Patients didn’t wait to start using Swedish’s new stand-alone emergency room at I-5 and 128th Street, which opened in February.
With an average of 62 patients a day, the Swedish/Mill Creek emergency room is treating more than do
uble the patients initially projected to use the new facility, said Dr. John Milne, who oversees Swedish Health Service’s satellite emergency rooms.
That adds up to about 900 more patients a month than initially expected and puts the emergency room on track to treat about 22,000 patients in i
ts first year.
“We had budgeted in the 25 to 30 (patient) a day range,” he said. “We’ve had to add staff and physicians more quickly than we expected.”
The response shows the community’s need for the services provided at the new emergency room, he said.
The emergency room, at 13020 Meridian Ave. SE, is part of a three-story, $30 million medical building that also is home to primary care and specialty medical offices.
It was built on property that was the former home of the Puget Park Drive-In.
It is the latest of three satellite emergency rooms — meaning there’s no hospital on-site — opened by the Seattle-based nonprofit health care organization. The other two are both in King County, in Redmond and Issaquah.
Swedish has three hospitals in Seattle and one in Edmonds. It plans to open a new hospital near Issaquah this summer.
It took less than two weeks after opening the Mill Creek emergency room to begin hitting the 60-patient-a-day average, Milne said.
The plan had been to have one physician in the emergency room at all times for the first four to five months. Two physicians are now working in the emergency room during the busiest times, from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., Milne said.
Nursing staff increased by the equivalent of four full-time positions after the first week. A maximum of five nurses are now working during peak hours, he said.
Four other support employees were added to the staff.
Patients who need to be hospitalized are transported to area hospitals, such as sister organization Swedish/Edmonds or competitor Providence Regional Medical Center Everett.
Swedish and Providence have waged an advertising battle over what they can offer the community.
In part, Swedish is promoting quick, “no-wait” service for emergency-room patients, with an average visit from start to finish taking just under 90 minutes, Milne said.
Meanwhile, Providence is promoting the opening of a new 79-room emergency department, part of a $460 million medical tower that opens in June.
Providence’s ads note that its emergency room is based at the hospital, which has a wider variety of specialty and diagnostic services.
Total time from arrival to discharge in the current, cramped emergency room can sometimes balloon to several hours during peak times.
Nevertheless, when Swedish/Mill Creek patients need to be transferred, it goes smoothly regardless of which hospital they go to, Milne said.
“Despite the fact that we’re competing, when it comes to taking care of individual patients, the physicians and nurses at Providence have been fantastic,” Milne said. “The corporate strategy happens at the CEO level.”
At Swedish/Mill Creek, patients can be treated for a maximum of 23 hours and then must be discharged or transferred to a hospital.
Patients who need to be transferred are asked which hospital they would like to be treated at and which is closest to their personal physician, he said.
The number of uninsured and Medicaid patients treated so far at Swedish/Mill Creek is higher than at the Issaquah stand-alone emergency room, Milne said.
About 30 percent of emergency room patients are on Medicaid, the federal-state health program for low-income patients. About 20 percent are uninsured, Milne said.
Roughly 40 percent of patients have health insurance.
So far, Mill Creek staff has seen a fairly typical mix of medical problems treated in emergency rooms, from cuts and broken bones to one patient who was having a stroke.
The stroke patient was linked via an Internet television connection for an initial assessment by a Swedish neurologist at one of the Seattle hospitals, Milne said.
Medical clinics are beginning to fill in the upper floors of Swedish/Mill Creek building. Those that are there now, or will be by May 1, are family practice, cardiology, orthopedics, sleep and pulmonology, general surgery and neurology.
Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.
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